Sunday Serial | 'The Breaking Crew,' Chapter 4

Jul. 24, 2010

Alex Taylor is the author of the story collection “The Name of the Nearest River,” which was published this spring by Louisville's Sarabande Books. A native of Rosine, Ky., his stories tend to be set in Ohio County and in Western Kentucky.

Tom Franklin said that for Taylor, “Kentucky is home and he'll bring it home to you in stories so vivid and lovely and funny you'll feel like a native.” Chris Offutt called him a “fresh new voice, not just in Kentucky but in American literature. His precise observations, deep insights, and confident prose lift his fiction to a soaring height. The characters are real people enduring real dilemmas: resourceful, hopeful, and compassionate. Taylor writes with generosity and understanding of rural and small town life.” Taylor, 28, earned his MFA in creative writing at the University of Mississippi.

Written by

Alex Taylor

“The Breaking Crew” is the fourth in a series of Sunday Serials running in The Courier-Journal's Arts section. We'll start a new short story, by a Louisville-area writer, on the first Sunday of each month. A new chapter will run in this space every week, building to the conclusion on the last Sunday of the month. To catch up with the first three parts of this story — or to read the other stories in the series by Tania James, Will Lavender and Chris Iovenko, visit www.courier-journal.com/sundayserial.

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The story so far: Mart thought he might be able to get away with letting the two tramps do his chores on the farm. But when his dad's very serious overseer caught Ernie and Drucilla doing Mart's work, the young man found himself in a heap of trouble.

***

Mart stepped down the pond bank, nearly slipping in the mud. When he was at the bottom beside the ice he said, “They're named Ernie and Drucilla.” He passed the water glass to Ernie, who took it but didn't drink. His face was startled and the color he'd worked into it from busting the pond ice was slowly flickering away.

“Ernie and Drucilla, huh?” said Ferlon. “You name them?”

“What?”

“I asked if you named them. Even trash like these two here got to be called something.” Ferlon pointed at Ernie. “Asked this big one there his name and he wouldn't tell me, so maybe he ain't learned it yet. I told him I'd just call him good for nothing if that'd be all right and he didn't say otherwise.”

Mart's nose dripped. He stood straight and still, watching Ferlon's lips flinch while the cold brushed across them. The cattle were bunched at the edge of the pond, slurping the thick gray water and grunting, blowing their thirst away while their hooves scraped at the frosty red banks.

“Look,” said Ferlon. “You know what it is you got here, don't you, Mart?”

Mart looked at the soggy ground and was quiet.

“There two here ain't nothing but strangers, and trashy ones at that. I'd be surprised if they ain't already raided your chicken coop by now. It's dangerous business hiring out folks you don't know and what you got that's good to pay them with anyhow?”

Mart put his hands in his pockets. The biscuit dough crumbled between his fingers, and when he looked at Ferlon dressed in his wool jacket and tall rubber gum boots, he wondered why a man's money was better than food, why anything mattered beyond a meal in your belly. If it had been his father who'd found the tramps, he would have run them off and not thought of them again, but the ragged dirty jacket Ernie wore and Drucilla's ruined shoes seemed carefully awful to Mart and he wasn't sorry he'd let them stay.

(Page 2 of 4)

“This farm ain't yours, Mr. Dunmire,” he said.

Ferlon pulled his hands from his pockets. They were large, worn hands with heavy fingers, and in the light they looked like tree roots bent and scrabbled from holding too much earth.

“We don't want to cause no trouble,” said Ernie. His voice shook. The water glass trembled in his hand.

Ferlon's hands balled up the way they did when he came to help Mart's father cut the spring calves. He was a strong man, and Mart had seen him slash fifty calves in an hour one April morning, nothing but the quick slick of the straight razor and then the streak of the tar-brush sealing the wound, the blood steaming in a black pool on the ground, the bucket of bull testicles like strange apples gathered from an orchard of gore.

“Mr. Dunmire, this farm don't belong to you. Me and Daddy say what comes and goes on it.”

Ferlon wheezed a smoky laugh. “Hell, boy. You sure must of growed a long one to talk to me that way. I bet your daddy don't even know these tramps are out here, does he?”

The strange liquor Ernie had given him crawled up the back of Mart's throat then, but he swallowed it down and the hard, tiny knot it made in the pit of him felt good. He pointed to the blank thawing hills.

“Mr. Dunmire,” he said. “You can just go on home now. We don't need you.”

Ferlon's grin slid from his face slowly like a wet cloth. “You 're smart-mouthed. I see I'm gonna have to turn you around sideways.”

He started to come up through the mud, but Mart leapt and yanked the ax from Ernie's hands.

“Stand back,” Mart growled. He held the ax against his chest.

Ferlon stopped where he was. His eyes grew wide, holding an animal look, and seeing him that way filled Mart with a lunging power. Ferlon wasn't afraid of him. He knew that. But there was something new in the man's eyes now that hadn't been there before. It was heavy and brooding and seemed to deepen the shadows on his face.

(Page 3 of 4)

“Look, there ain't got to be no trouble,” Ernie said. “We'll just go ahead and leave.” He shivered while he talked, his thick blue lips waggling beneath his mustache. Beside him, Drucilla stood quiet. A wild look had come to her. She seemed ready to break and run over the frosty fields. Both she and Ernie looked different now. Lying in the dirty saddle blankets in the barn with the straw bunched under their heads and the cedary smoke of the fire hanging in the air, they appeared vicious and smooth, but now they were only weak and pitiful in their raggedy clothes, Ernie's face startled and loose, Drucilla gawking foolish and frozen at the scene before her.

“What you going to do, Mart?” Ferlon asked. He began moving slowly toward Mart again, sliding through the mud. “You gonna smash my head over a couple of hobos? That what you gonna do?”

Mart kept still. The ax was heavy and he tried to imagine a way he could change everything with it. There wasn't anything, not the farm or the cattle or his father that could stop him, and it wasn't even the weight of the ax that mattered but only the certainty of what he could do with it. All the world could be felled or left alone, and the thought gave him a worn drowsy feeling as if he'd just traveled a great distance.

“You best put that ax down and let me and you settle this.” Ferlon was still coming through the mud and Mart waited, listening to his boots squeak.

“Give me that ax,” said Ferlon.

Mart shook his head. “You'll have to take it away from me.”

Ferlon's grin came back, his blue lips thinning as they settled close against his teeth. “Give me that thing!”

He leapt up the pond bank, but Mart was quick and turned away from him and then, in a long unfolding instant, he brought the ax around, swinging it hard. The blade hit Ferlon just above the elbow, and Mart felt the muted connection of iron meeting bone draw up through the wooden handle and then shiver out through the ends of his fingers, Ferlon's face going white as he sprawled into the snow, clutching his broken arm.

(Page 4 of 4)

He closed his eyes and then wrenched them open again, staring at Mart from where he lay in the snowy mud of the pond bank. “You done killed yourself now, boy. You done killed yourself,” he said.

Mart let the ax hang limp at his side, the blade dragging in the mud. Ernie and Drucilla had bolted when he swung the ax and he looked down the pond dam to watch them bumbling through the wet snow, their strides throwing wild sprays of frost into the air. Soon, they reached the far dark of the cedar trees and became only a sound scattered and broken as their feet crackled through the dead leaves and needles, and then they were nothing at all, taken by the distant winter hills.

“You done killed yourself, Mart,” Ferlon breathed again. He pushed himself up from the mud, clutching his arm. His face was tight with pain and the breath whistled through his teeth.

“Maybe,” Mart said, hefting the ax onto his shoulder. “But it could be I just got started with the killing I got to do today.”

Ferlon squinted at him, his teeth bared and gritted. Slowly, he backed up the muddy pond bank. “You've ruined it all for you now, boy,” he said. “Don't think you ain't. It's all ruined and can't nothing mend it back again.”

Mart turned up the sloping path leading back to his house then, stopping every little bit to look behind him, and in that still moment before Ferlon Dunmire turned back to the hills and empty trees, Mart saw him cradling his arm while the wind bled through the walnut boughs above, and something about the cold trickling air and the hurt man watching him from far off told him the farm would never be his. The thirsty cattle and the broad pastures — that soil had claimed him for its own years ago.

He threw the ax and it clattered and slid over the pond ice. On the hill, Ferlon was gone, but his blood remained on the snow, the bright red color something Mart knew would rule him forever.

In his pocket, he found the biscuits he'd meant to give Ernie and Drucilla. He ate them both slowly, the hard dough scraping his throat. He tried to think of Ernie and Drucilla, of the place they might be going to, but their faces were already blurring in his mind, both of them blank as snowy pasture, until they were hardly there at all, scant flurries that had passed through his life.

Mart moved toward the pond, shoving the gathered cattle out of his way. Kneeling in the mud, he put his lips to the gray water sliding through the ice and drank. The taste was sour and grit washed over his teeth, but he swallowed all of it down. Soon, the cattle had congregated back around him and he knew that if anyone were watching the pond from far off they wouldn't see him, that he was not there at all. There was only the snow and the cold and the drinking cows. That was all.

Next week in Arts: The beginning of our August serial by Jessica Leader.